# Claude-User vs Googlebot

Claude-User and Googlebot compared on 11 documented fields, from 20 claims, last verified 2026-09-15.

| Field | Claude-User | Googlebot | Comparison |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | not_documented | yes | different |
| honours_crawl_delay | yes | no | different |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | not documented | 0.991 | different |
| publishes_ip_list | yes | yes | same |
| purpose_documented | user_fetch | search | different |
| reads_llms_txt | not_documented | no | different |
| respects_robots_txt | yes | yes | same |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | not_documented | yes | different |
| user_agent_string_full | not_documented | Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) | different |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | no | not documented | different |
| verifiable_by_rdns | not_documented | yes | different |

## Differences

| Field | Claude-User statement | Googlebot statement |
| --- | --- | --- |
| cites_sources | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude responses cite pages fetched by Claude-User. | Google AI Overviews and AI Mode return AI generated responses with links to supporting websites. |
| honours_crawl_delay | Claude-User respects the Crawl-delay directive in robots.txt when fetching pages. | Google does not support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive for Googlebot. |
| observed_verified_request_ratio_census | not documented | Googlebot requests to Rattlesnakes By Mail matched Google's published IP ranges on 108 of 109 requests between 2026-09-13T20:00Z and 2026-09-15T09:00Z. Googlebot's first request to Rattlesnakes By Mail in that window was /robots.txt at 2026-09-14T11:53:00Z. |
| purpose_documented | Claude-User accesses websites in response to questions that individual users ask Claude. | Googlebot crawls pages for Google Search, Google Images, Google Video, Google News, and Discover. |
| reads_llms_txt | Anthropic does not publish whether Claude-User reads llms.txt files. | Google Search does not use llms.txt files. |
| separate_search_and_training_tokens | Anthropic does not document Claude-User as a search or training opt-out token. | Google separates Search crawling under the Googlebot token from Gemini training under the Google-Extended token. |
| user_agent_string_full | Anthropic does not publish a full user agent string for Claude-User. | Googlebot sends the user agent string Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html). |
| user_fetch_exception_documented | Anthropic applies the same robots.txt statement to Claude-User as to ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot and documents no exception for user-initiated fetches. | not documented |
| verifiable_by_rdns | Anthropic does not publish a reverse-DNS verification method for Claude-User. | Googlebot requests are verifiable by reverse DNS lookup resolving to googlebot.com, google.com, or googleusercontent.com. |

## Sources

- https://claude.com/crawling/bots.json
- https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetchers/verifying-googlebot
- https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/07/a-note-on-unsupported-rules-in-robotstxt
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- https://developers.google.com/static/crawling/ipranges/common-crawlers.json
- https://rattlesnakesbymail.com/observed/googlebot
- https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-content-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler